...aka CYS autism compilation. Here's a list of random info I always wanted to know, and have finally gotten the answer to, for all the fellow curious autists.

Commendations

Commendations are calculated in the following way: 25 +  the square root of the story word count divided by 4.

What this means is that every single story will get 25 commendation points, and then some extra for length. Difficulty, rating, or category have no influence on the number of commendations you receive.

Manual calculations have been done for all 3 of my games, and the math checks out:

Vincha | Word count: 22146 | 62 commendations | 25 + SQRT(22146)/4 = 25 + (148.81)/4 = 25 + 37,2 = 62,2 (rounded down to 62)

What a terrible World | Word count: 46137 | 79 commendations | 25 + SQRT(46137)/4 = 25 + (214.79)/4 = 25 + 53,69 = 78.69 (rounded up to 79)

Slavic Pagans | Word count: 44000 | 77 commendations | 25 + SQRT(44000)/4 = 25 + (209,76)/4 = 25 + 52,44 = 77,44 (rounded down to 77).

Game length

Game length is calculated with simple ranges:
WordCount BETWEEN 0 AND 999 gives you a length of 1.
WordCount BETWEEN 1000 AND 4999 gives you a length of 2.
WordCount BETWEEN 5000 AND 9999 gives you a length of 3.
WordCount BETWEEN 10000 AND 14999 gives you a length of 4.
WordCount BETWEEN 15000 AND 24999 gives you a length of 5.
WordCount BETWEEN 25000 AND 74999 gives you a length of 6.
WordCount BETWEEN 75000 AND 199999 gives you a length of 7.
WordCount >= 200000 gives you a length of 8.

There are probably exceptions to this in some games because at some point the length was calculated in an extremely weird and unintuitive way that I don't wanna get into. All you need to know is it was retarded.

Hourly and daily updates.

"Statistics" and game ratings are calculated every hour at 00. You probably noticed some glitchiness if you ever looked at game ratings around that time.

Awarding trophies, birthdays, and processing unaccepted duels happens once a day. Duels that haven't been accepted in 3 days will be auto-resolved. If it takes longer than that (as happened to me) something fucked up somewhere.

Rating weight

So it's no secret that more valuable members have a greater effect on storygame ratings than the plebians or, even worse, the guests. But have you ever wondered SPECIFICALLY how much voting weight you have on this website? Well, you can find out with this simple calculation.

Guest = 1
Site Administrator = 100
Forum administrator with less than 500 points (as if that would ever happen) = 25
Regular plebs with less than 500 points = 5 + ([Point Total] / 100)
Regular plebs with over 500 points = 25 + (([Point Total]-500)/750)

So basically... points are almost meaningless, except before you clear the first threshold. When you clear 500 points, you basically have as much weight as anyone else. At 500 points you have a weight of 25. At 5000, you have a weight of 31.

This means admins count for just a bit under 4 contributing members. They also count for 100 guests.

The point? Rating your own storygame is practically meaningless, unless you make a bunch of accounts and get them to 500. And you'll definitely be noticed if you do that.

A funny side-effect of the way SQL procedures work is that if a regular site member was to reach 56751 points or more, they would have more voting weight than an admin... while an admin with 10000000 points will still only have a weight of 100.

Top Endorsed, aka 'of Avon'

If two people tie for the most endorsements during the day, the person with more points will get the title. If nobody gets any commendations, the title goes to the person with the most points, which is, at the moment, BerkaZerka.

Lucky dueler trophy

So this one has always been an object of curiosity to me, and I have thankfully found the answer. Here are the requirements for the lucky dueler trophy:

- The person with the highest win percentage in duels (that one is obvious).
- That person must also have dueled in the last 60 days, else it goes to the next person on the list.
- The person must also have over 100 duels in total, else it would just be bouncing around random noobs that won their first duel and then stopped.
- There is also one final, most important check for the lucky dueler trophy...

It cannot be awarded to one of the people in the picture.

Oh, but don't bother going for this one since I let Avery know all she has to do is duel once every 60 days. She's keeping it permanently now.

I probably forgot a couple of things, but ask anything you're curious about and I'll try to look it up.

Leaking CYS Temple secrets.  Nice!

I always wondered (well, as long as I've been around) about how rating weight was calculated.

Thanks for the peak behind the curtain.

I have an interesting observation to add to this. 

For anyone unaware, trying to look at Endmaster's recent point history results in a loading page that just keeps adding periods after the word loading. I decided to spend some time I had to procrastinate the researching and planning phase of my contest entry by testing to see if the periods go on forever or if you are rewarded for patience. The following are my findings.

 It takes 45.85 seconds to complete one full line of periods before it continues on the line below it. I waited for enough time to count 33 lines. This results in 1513.05 seconds or rounds to about 25.22 minutes. My patience then gave out. It was still going when I clicked off. 

EndMaster lives in a realm far beyond the accrual of mere points. 

Trying to point stalk him would most likely be... well, pointless.

However, since he has infinite points, perhaps next time try waiting an infinite number of seconds for them to load.

Next time I have infinite seconds of free time I might try that.

loading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It keeps going even once it hits the bottom of the page lol

You must have been very bored lol.

3J needs to lighten up. I am all about everybody knowing all of the information.

Based, based, based, based, based!

It's so lame and faggy, almost CoG like to leave loyal site members in the dark on such prudent things. Now we know why Briar loses her trophy sometimes, things about commendations, story length, voting weight, what certain people can't get trophies apparently, etc.

Being the one that's constantly spit roasted in the middle in Cali orgies seems to make one gay in the lame way in terms of personality as well it appears.

Don't tell anyone, but you're my favorite. Just work on your crossing the street skills. 

I love you so much Cel. Darn, I was really curious about the word count and was fiddling with it for a while. Thanks for clearing it up. To be honest, this could really be made into an article.

Props to Cel for spreading CYStian edicts to the land!

A question: Do you know how CYS defines "finished"? More specifically, how can it sometimes be a lower number than the number of ratings? Example, from Mission Sunshine:

Based on 23 ratings since 08/24/2022
Played 262 times (finished 11)

Commendation Optimization

• If your word count is between 7k and 62k, add 25 to it - that's the number of comms you'll get.


• 29k is the magic number. The best way to farm comms, taking into account time + effort + likelyhood-of-commendation is to write games with 29k words (68 comms). After that, the rate is less than 1k/comm.


• The next magic number is 62k. If you like writing longer games or you're going for a category feature spot (ie you are mystic or ninja), this is your point to aim for. After this, the returns are genuinely awful at around 3k/comm.


• You're better off writing reviews or funny forum posts than writing a game over 62k.


• If you want exactly 100 comms from your game for some reason, it needs to be 89-91k. (notice 4k+/comm in this range)


• Two 10k games = one 90k game (both 100c)


• Three 29k games = one 515k game (both 204c).


• Adding one more 29k game to the previous point: four 29k games (272c) = one 1M (million) word game (275c).


• The ROI after 30k is generally not worth the effort and the returns after 62k are negligible. Anything after 100k is downright non-existant (over 5k/c)

Ah, yes, indeed.

Very intriguing.

I have to uphold the admin's wishes and shut down this entire thing soon.

Sorry, nothing personal.

Even the autists are too lazy to read and write around here anyway, so this won't even be a problem.

It's okay.

People barely read or write anyway.

It's rarer to find someone that does both.

If someone wants to game the commendations, they're still doing 100% more work and effort than everyone else anyway, so maybe they deserve to reap the benefits.

Hmmm, actually with contests being a thing, everyone's writing a lot more than before, and the creative corner gets some use as well. It's more of the reading and barely/slowly rating things.

Yeah I doubt we need to worry about people optimizing commendations, and as Thara said, active members being incentivized to do productive things hardly harms the site. 

Personally, as much as I enjoy finding out about all this information (thank you Celicni and Ford!), if my storygame takes over 62k words to tell, I definitely won't limit myself due to commendations. And even if there happens to be a commendation war between orders, an influx of 29k storygames can only be seen as a benefit.

But I'm all for longer games getting more comms. Totally no bias here whatsoever.

Edit: If any of you have time, I'd like to find out how the Top Storygames (Overall) list works. I'm guessing you'd need a certain number of ratings to get there, and this probably does something to the ranking, but it's a bit strange to see some games with ratings of 5 higher than those with 6 or 7.

If you hover over the rating of a storygame, a little popup will show up showing "adjusted rating". I may get back to you with a detailed explanation of how the adjusted rating works, but I just wanted to give a quick answer for now.

Basically, top storygames overall is ranked by the "adjusted" rating, rather than the actual rating. Rogues is technically rated higher than eternal, but its adjusted rating is lower, hence it is #2 rather than #1.

At a glance, I can tell this is because it has less ratings.

To give you an example, your game, Dreamtruder, has an official rating of 6.45, yet an adjusted rating of 5.58. As it gets more ratings, the adjusted and the official rating will get closer and closer, until they match up (which will probably never happen cause even fucking eternal has a discrepancy of 0.01 between the actual rating and the adjusted rating).

That's pretty interesting, thanks! For some reason, I never really knew there were adjusted ratings lol, and always thought the storygame length was the only thing you could hover over.

The more ratings a story gets, the more its adjusted rating will match to its calculated rating, and it will match less to the "mean" of all the games on the site.

The thing about that game is its rating is BASICALLY AT THE MEAN OF ALL THE GAMES (as I said in my other post). 

If you look at the formula, you'll see that the adjusted rating is basically 1/x * the actual rating and 1/y * the average rating of all the games. At 50 ratings it's 1/2 and 1/2. At 100 it's 2/3 * true rating, and 1/3 * the average.

But if the true rating matches the average, the proportion doesn't matter. The game has a rating of 3.95 and the average is 3.94 (or could be 3.95 by now, again, I'm working with an out of date database).

A funny side effect of this kind of calculation is that a storygame with an actual rating of like... 3... Would end up having an adjusted rating higher than its actual rating.

Edit: As demonstrated with this game, for example. The Wormtongue Journals: Book One

The more the actual rating is away from the average rating of all the games, the larger the discrepancy and the more ratings it needs to have to match up the two ratings.

Sorry, I know this post is a mess, but I just woke up. Hope you still understood what I meant.

Thanks Ford.  You saved me from having to work out the math for myself, 

Not that I would be fishing for Coms, but figuring out those thresholds would have been too tempting to ignore.

Nicely done.

That would require somebody on this website to actually read.

Well, ya'll can thank Mystic for this one... Mystic I fucking hate you, I was supposed to be asleep an hour and a half ago.

Adjusted rating

aka "why are higher rated storygames ranked lower in the top storygames list, or the best of in a year".

So as expected, CYS is very inconsistent. It ranks some pages based on the calculated rating, aka the one that you see. An example of this is when you enter a storygame category, for example Grimdark.

The first Grimdark story in the list is The Pure, the Vile and the Deadly yet it's only ranked 18 overall.

This is because the "top storygames (overall)" page (as well as the overall site ranking) ranks them by the mysterious adjusted rating whose calculations only the ancient sages knew...

...until now!

Rating Count = Total number of ratings for that specific game.
Minimum rating = 50 (aka the minimum required to be properly ranked)
Calculated rating = the absolute rating for that specific game, aka the one that you see without hovering over the rating.
Mean rating = the average rating for all the CYS storygames that have over 50 ratings (so it doesn't include the unranked games). Honestly this should be a part of its own but I'm too tired for now and will just say that the average rating of all the stories with over 50 ratings on CYS is 3.94*. Surprisingly lower than I thought.

*3.94 is actually the average rating of all of the games on the database backup I got two weeks ago, so the number PROBABLY has changed slightly meanwhile.

The formula for the adjusted rating is as follows:

(Rating Count / (Rating Count + Minimum rating)) * Calculated rating + (Minimum rating / (Rating Count + Minimum rating) * Mean rating)

Unless you're a fucking nerd, you're probably not going to bother manually calculating this to check out if it's true so I spared you the effort and did a calculation for one of my own storygames, Vincha . It has 86 ratings, a calculated rating of 5.74, and an adjusted rating of 5.05.

(86 / (86 + 50)) * 5.74 + (50 / (86 + 50) * 3.94) =

3.62 + 1.44 = 5.06

Note that the calculation is, again, done with the backup of the database and not the current database, so the "mean" rating is off, and the calculation is off by 0.01. And I also rounded a bit. But you get the point.

And the point is that the more ratings your story gets, the more your Calculated Rating and your Adjusted Rating will match.

Big thanks to Maz for helping me find a missing parenthesis while I was figuring this mess out. He deserves way more credit, given he's more experienced than Ford and I combined.

Great job Cel.  These trips down the rabbit hole are very interesting.

Thank you for the explanation, Celicni! And props to Maz too. It's truly interesting to find out these things about the site and how the different systems work. 

Also, I just realized that if a storygame has fewer than 50 ratings, the adjusted one will be 0.00. Which makes sense given the calculation here.

These are fascinating breakdowns.